February 2017

Augmented & Virtual Reality Developer Landscape

Exploring early adopters, plus device and tool leaders.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) had a lot of hype in 2016. There’s excitement because low cost smartphone components have made both technologies feasible for the mass market, although there is not yet a viable consumer market for apps and content. While hardware platforms for both technologies have made great strides forward, they are not yet really ready for the mass market. However, the potential for AR and VR are clear to many, including large numbers of developers that want to explore the possibilities and position themselves to profit from a future wave of growth.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) had a lot of hype in 2016. There’s excitement because low cost smartphone components have made both technologies feasible for the mass market, although there is not yet a viable consumer market for apps and content. While hardware platforms for both technologies have made great strides forward, they are not yet really ready for the mass market. However, the potential for AR and VR are clear to many, including large numbers of developers that want to explore the possibilities and position themselves to profit from a future wave of growth.

In the Augmented and Virtual Reality Developer Landscape report we look at these early adopters and pioneers to see what they’re building and why, which platforms they favour, what tools they’re using and the challenges they face. The date comes from the 11th Edition of our Developer Economics survey, which reached 4,000+ AR/VR developers from 140+ countries. More than 1,200 of them answered detailed questions about their AR and VR related development work.

This report provides valuable insight into the current state of the AR and VR developer ecosystems for anyone interested in investing in tools or platforms for these markets. It also provides useful information for positioning developer offerings for those who are already deeply involved in this space.

The Augmented & Virtual Reality Developer Landscape report comes with a single user license. If you are interested in an enterprise-wide license please contact us.

The key questions answered in this report are:

Who are the early adopter developers in AR and VR, and what are they building?

How many developers focus on AR versus VR? How many are working on both technologies?

Which AR and VR hardware platforms are developers building new experiences for?

What types of experience are they building?

Why are they developing with these technologies?

What tools are they using?

What are their top challenges?

To get a full list of this report’s contents and a sample graph, please download the brochure.

The 11th edition of our Developer Economics survey reached more than 16,500+ developers in more than 140 countries. Just over 4,000 of those developers were involved in Augmented and/or Virtual Reality development work. More than 1,200 of those developers answered detailed questions about that work. The data from this survey, the largest research to date on AR/VR developers, give us a unique perspective at how the AR/VR developer ecosystem is evolving.

The online survey was translated into 9 languages (Chinese, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese) and promoted by 59 leading community and media partners within the mobile, desktop, cloud, IoT, machine learning and augmented and virtual reality industries. We corrected for regional bias and segment distribution bias across our outreach channels.